When Prime Minister
Julia Gillard
talks, she speaks with a broad Australian accent, but her choice of literature is very American. The country’s alternative PM,
Tony Abbott
, looks to England and the works of fellow Catholic J. R. R. Tolkien for inspiration.

Books don’t just give our politicians a break from their ever-hectic political life, although surely they do at least that. Reading lists also inform and challenge views.

Or, as Dr Seuss says: “The more you read, the more things you will know."

And the more we know about what our politicians like to read (or not), the more insight we have into what type of society our policymakers are striving to create. Their literature-influenced world views may have an effect on political agendas, election platforms and even how budget funds should be allocated.

With this in mind, AFR Weekend asked 30 frontbenchers – 15 from Labor and 15 Liberal/Nationals – to tell us about their reading ­habits. We received responses from nine on the government side and 12 from the Coalition. (We also sought responses from Greens leader Christine
Milne
and
Bob Katter
, from Katter’s Australian Party, just because we were curious.)

As our results show, the Liberal/Nationals were better at responding to the survey than their progressive counterparts. We implied to one Labor press secretary that perhaps conservative politicians read more.

“But we write more books!" the press ­secretary responded. This appears to be true, at least in recent years.
Mark Latham
, Lindsay Tanner,
Maxine McKew
,
Bob Carr
,
Chris Bowen
and
Kim Carr
are among those Labor faithful who have put, or are putting, pen to paper.

We asked three questions: what are you reading now; what book has had the greatest impact on you; and what book have you never been able to finish?

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The results show politicians tend to favour non-fiction over fiction, and there is a strong bias towards American literature.

Personal side of cancer battle

Some answers were very personal, such as that from opposition resources spokesman
Ian Macfarlane
, who spoke of the book that helped him get through a laryngeal cancer ­diagnosis 10 years ago: fallen cycling ­champion Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike.

“It was part of the process of prevailing over the cancer that threatened to end my ministerial and political career and perhaps do worse," he says. “In spite of the disappointing revelations that have come to light about Lance Armstrong’s career in the years since then, the fact remains that this book reveals the personal side of a battle with ­cancer and I think it’s always valuable for people in that situation to know that others have fought a similar health battle and won."

Other answers shed light on the reasons MPs were drawn to politics, such as Deputy Opposition Leader
Julie Bishop
’s encounter with Burmese democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi. In 1995, Bishop, then a young lawyer, travelled to Burma after reading Suu Kyi’s collection of essays ­Freedom from Fear. Bishop was granted an audience with the pro-democracy campaigner, who had been under house arrest for six years.

“I spent about an hour with her at her home and it was a meeting that helped change the course of my life," says Bishop. “She inspired me to think about the contribution I could make to my country and, 12 months later, while on a sabbatical at ­Harvard Business School, I decided to leave my legal career and consider running for public office."

Then there are the more comical responses. For instance, what book have you never been able to finish? Shadow Treasurer
Joe Hockey
says Mark Latham’s Civilising Global Capital was “unreadable", while Nationals leader
Warren Truss
says this of The Latham Diaries: “Every page makes me so pleased I am on the side of ­politics that I am."

Intriguingly, Pyne loved The Making of the President 1960, by Theodore White, which describes the “first modern political campaign using market research and electronic media that set the benchmark for all ­subsequent sophisticated modern political campaign techniques".

Anthony Albanese
, the Minister for ­Infrastructure and Transport, who is fond of saying how much he “likes fighting Tories", is currently drawing inspiration from United States President
Barack Obama
’s The Audacity of Hope. He lists Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom as the most influential book he has read.

“In spite of extraordinary provocation, there is not even a hint of hatred or ­negativity. It is a triumph of the human spirit," Albanese says.

Bernadette Brennan
, lecturer in Australian literature at the University of Sydney, says it is disappointing but not surprising there aren’t more great works of fiction on the politicians’ reading lists.

“You can appreciate that when they are this busy and they have so many meetings and so many emails and so little time, that they will turn to some type of non-fiction rather than a fictional universe where you have to lose yourself," Brennan says.

“The beauty of fiction is to take you somewhere that imaginatively you might not have been. Perhaps they don’t have the time or energy to do that."

Poignantly, Milne admits that fiction is a luxury that she has only “snatched and limited periods" to engage in, such is the busyness of politics.

Trend from fiction to non-fiction dangerous

Michael Levine
, chair of philosophy at the University of Western Australia, says he fears the trend away from fiction to non-fiction is a dangerous one. “Fiction, like great art, is what brings us together. It’s very much about the real world, how people live, how people choose to resolve things; it’s about how people fail."

Brenda Walker
, chair of English and cultural studies at the University of Western Australia, says politics and the novel have been hand in hand for a very long time. “The obvious thing the novel can offer any reader is a glimpse of the hugeness of human character, and how self-destruction is often at the heart of self-advancement in politics and love," Walker says.

Meanwhile, Resources Minister
Gary Gray
is reading Life, co-authored by Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, and says a biography of Abraham Lincoln – Team of Rivals; the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin – is the most influential book he has read.

No politicians admitted to being inspired by Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince – a treatise that justifies the use of immoral means to further one’s objectives – even though it is essential reading for political strategists. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since acknowledging Machiavelli as an inspiration would serve as a political death warrant.

In short, it would go against Machiavellian principles of furthering one’s career by admitting to reading Machiavelli.

Russian classics have a place

There were some interesting author admissions. No respondent mentioned Jane Austen or Ernest Hemingway. Leo Tolstoy received only two mentions. One was by Finance Minister
Penny Wong
, with the understandable concession that she was yet to conquer the Russian author’s historical epic, War and Peace.

Peter Garrett
, Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth, cites War and Peace as one of the books that has had the biggest impact on him. He also names the autobiography A Fortunate Life, by Gallipoli veteran Albert Facey, in a rare mention in the survey of an Australian classic.

Another Russian great, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, is popular among the ­country’s political elite. Foreign Affairs ­Minister
Bob Carr
is rereading The Brothers Karamazov, although
Barnaby Joyce
has never quite been able to finish it.

Brennan, at the University of Sydney, says: “I was pleased to see Bob Carr was reading The Brothers Karamazov; it is just an extra­ordinary book. I was pleased to see [Climate Change Minister]
Greg Combet
was reading The Quiet American. It’s a very sensitive novel. If [Combet] is reading that sort of ­literature, then that shows an interesting, thinking person."

The democratic socialist George Orwell makes an appearance as inspiration to ­Coalition industry spokeswoman
Sophie Mirabella
, with his classic, 1984.

“As a teenager I found it captivating and thought-provoking and a powerful description of the eternal struggle between freedom and tyranny," Mirabella says.

Carr was also inspired by a book that delves into the battle against the worst of humanity, naming If This is a Man, by ­Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, as a major influence. “It reminds us of what humans are capable of and what totalitarian governments can do. It says a lot about humanity."

Schools’ canon of required reading

Similar themes – albeit couched in a completely different type of book – had a major influence on two of Labor’s most prominent female politicians. Penny Wong and
Kate Ellis
both nominated Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as the book that has had the greatest impact.

Required reading in high school for many generations, the book explores issues of race and justice in the American South through the eyes of six-year-old Scout.

“Scout’s narration of a child’s perception of racism, principle and her world both engaged me and invited reflection," Wong says.

Ellis says: “I’ve loved it and its lessons about integrity, justice and humility ever since high school."

Not everyone believes the 1960s classic is a logical fit for politicians.
Julian Murphet
, professor of modern literature at the University of NSW, says he finds the book a disturbing choice for a politician when the plot eschews politics in all its forms.

“Atticus Finch is the hero who stands alone for justice within a sanctioned institution of the racist state; his efforts fail of necessity. Politicians don’t have any part to play in a book where collective politics is dismissed as a path of progress in favour of private forms of courage," Murphet says.

“A politician saying that To Kill a ­Mockingbird is his favourite work of fiction is like a porn star saying that Steel Magnolias is her favourite film – a kind of telltale non sequitur."

Rich Pascal
, visiting arts fellow at the Australian National University, says it’s not surprising the book made such an impression on a young Wong or Ellis, given the tender age of its narrator.

“It’s perfect for adolescents; they can ­identify with that innocence because they’re still close to it, but at the same time, the darker aspects of life are becoming clearer to them, as they are to Scout," he says.

The Bible has a place

History’s biggest seller, the Bible, featured on three politicians’ most influential lists – Joyce, Nationals leader
Warren Truss
and the Liberals’ Leader of Opposition in the ­Senate,
Eric Abetz.

Joyce provided one of the most poetic responses to the survey when asked which books made the biggest impact: “The Bible, obviously, but also The Odyssey by Homer because it is a journey and you always end up at home." He may also have provided one of the most politically incorrect responses with his answer on which book he has never been able to finish: “The Koran, because I always find something else to do," he said.

Another politician known for not mincing his words, Katter says his idea of hell is a world with no books. He names the book that has offered him the most inspiration as Winston Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples, which he read as a Queensland National MP during the turbulent era of the Fitzgerald inquiry into police ­corruption.

As the then state Aboriginal and Islander Affairs minister, he says he was trying to convince Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen to help indigenous Queenslanders out of what he called their “terrible plight".

“I read it every night and it inspired me, that every single right and freedom we have was won with blood and effort," he says. “It’s easily the most uplifting book I’ve ever read, and I bought copies for all my children."

As for the book he has never finished, ­Katter, who dismisses arguments for man-induced climate change as “lightweight", names Tim Flannery’s Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?

“With Flannery, I thought this guy gets so much press I should read it, but it was the greatest rubbish and non-relevance. Not one single page in the entire thing was of value."

Surprisingly, Katter does praise another prominent climate activist.

“I read Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth cover to cover. I dislike his thesis but there’s a lot of good stuff in there. I made lots of notes in the margins," he says.

Walker, from UWA, says the works of great writers can remind readers of the value and importance of the individual.

“The American novelist Saul Bellow said ‘in art you become familiar with due process. You can’t simply write people off or send them to hell’," she says. “It’s very hard to ­simply condemn a political opponent if you fall in step with the imagination of a great novelist like Tolstoy."

Her statements don’t necessarily ring true in light of what has been an unusually vicious parliament over the past few years – and will undoubtedly be an equally vicious election campaign ahead of the September vote – but perhaps they provide a benchmark for how politics could be conducted.

The Lord of the Rings

Either way, if the literary choices of the ­fitness-conscious Opposition Leader are any indicator, the Liberals are well prepared for a marathon election campaign. Abbott says he loves a heroic quest, with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy the work he still reads and rereads. “It was a cult book back in the ’70s. I read it then and I have periodically reread it, most recently about eight years ago. Before that I read it aloud to my children . . . I guess I’ve always found quest stories appealing," he says.

Gillard concedes she was probably too young when she read the book that most influenced her, Steinbeck’s depression-era saga The Grapes of Wrath, given the traumatic content. “I vividly and personally felt the distress and injustice of it all. It was one of the first adult books I ever read, so the force of the story and the emotions it stirs have never left me," she says.

Murphet, from UNSW, says The Grapes of Wrath is “as close as American populism ever came to a straightforwardly socialist ethic".

“It would be a refreshing sight to see our Prime Minister taking a leaf out of her favourite book and declaring to the House her fervent belief that banks are man-eating monsters, that oligarchs are tyrants responsible for untold human misery, and that it is sometimes perfectly legitimate to, well . . . ‘take a sock at a cop’."